Mary Ann Caws était l’invitée d’honneur du colloque du CIPA consacré au poème en prose le 21 avril 2015. Critique littéraire et historienne de l’art, elle a écrit de nombreux ouvrages sur des personnalités aussi différentes que Woolf, Proust, Cornell, Picasso, Motherwell, Jabès ou encore Blaise Pascal. Elle est aussi la co-directrice (avec Hermine Riffaterre) de l’ouvrage collectif The Prose Poem in France. Elle nous livre ici une réflexion joyeuse et colorée sur la poésie contemporaine dans ses relations au bonheur et à la simplicité.
What a dreadfully optimistic, in fact, gooey title to put forward in a time of such unmitigated gloom all around us. Never mind.
And another never mindness: I don’t feel like discussing theoretical concerns, finding them so well addressed in Michel Delville’s own Crossroads Poetics. What I’m interested in these days is stuff like details, fragments, aphoristic mumblings and outpourings, erasures and destructions and omissions and rebuildings up, moreness and lessness and obsessions. In Botho Strauss’s Beginnlosigkeit of 1992, to which Michel refers, that “beginlessness” of steady state theory about which I so happily understand nothing.
What I understand about, and in and through is something about seeing. And seeing through poetry. So here is the very wonderful Kenneth Patchen’s poem about color, about a glorious and cheerful pinkness, as it edges into blueness. That blueness will return, as the blues always do, in music and in the poetry of painting:
“Delighting in Bluepink”
Flowers! My friend, be delighted with what you like; but with something.
Be delighted with something. Yesterday for me it was watching sun on stones; wet
stones.
I spent the morning lost in the wonder of that. A delight of god's size.
The gods never saw anything more enchanting than that. Gorgeous! the sun on wet
stones.
But today what delights me is thinking of bluepink flowers! Not that I've seen any ...
Actually there isn't a flower of any kind in the house - except in my head.
But, my friend, oh my friend! what wonderful bluepink flowers! Delight in my bluepink
flowers!
Alas, perhaps alas, narrativeness interests me not at all. I can’t tell a story or a joke, for I forget the punch line or what leads up to it, cannot possibly write the novel or even the historical fiction that my agent so delightfully urges me to do. So one might well wonder how I could possibly care about — or much less or more — speak about the prose poem. When I had to do all that for the Princeton Encylopedia of Poetics and its revised edition about the prose poem way back when, I was glad beyond belief to have Stephen Fredman’s Poet’s Prose and Jonathan Monroe’s A Poverty of Objects to crunch on, because when – for my sins and friendship, sometimes so often the same – I had accepted to do a small anthology of the Prose Poem way even more back when, I was just merrily assembling things and more things. That is exactly what I did, with Hermine Riffaterre, because Michael Riffaterre had asked me to. I do often what I am asked, and that is usually because I really love assembling.
And was then heavily, as in heavily, into the French prose poem: was there any other then? Of course, Russell Edson and Michael Benedikt, but since I had tangled with Benedikt over my so beloved René Char because of whom I actually moved my family to France a long time ago, they weren’t much on my mind or heart, as was the French prose poem.
Enough of the past so problematic and so ongoableonfrom now. It’s like this: I started reading Robert Hass, first because a student friend had said: “do something for me. Read Robert Hass’s ‘Meditation at Lagunitas.’” You do things for friends, as I said and as I believe, and for students, ditto, and I read it. It is not a poem in prose, no, but I was, and now am forever, hooked. I will read you the beginning, despite my passion for beginninglessness, and then the end, for which I hope I will never lose my passion:
All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.
So much is there in this poem, in whose middle there are love, body, loss, and dreams. So much.
But I was grabbed, of course, how not, by the word blackberry blackberry blackberry repeated, so movingly, thrice.
Not, I think, because I grew up as an Episcopalian, in which church serves there are litanies and repetitions, and even a trinity, but because I had so wanted to be a poet and was such a terrible poet that I decided to write on other people’s grand poetry. Unforgettably for me, and forgettably for anyone who heard me read or instead or subsequently read my first line of my, yes, best poem, this line went like this:
I picked some flowers today, John…
OK, dreary, so after a slight volume, I stopped. “John” as in the poem had said my knees were perfect to hold and ashtray on, and that did it.
It wasn’t, then, in the Robert Hass poem, just the word repeated triply, “blackberry,” certainly not the fruit, since the seeds stick so in your teeth, but the whole damned thing. How real poetry gets to your bones. Then you have to read his poem about the fruit and the act of gathering it, and you will see, I hope, how reading and thinking and desiring merge in this gathering of this berry: the poem is called “Picking Blackberries with a friend who has been reading Jacques Lacan.”
In it, the words stain, the berries gather juice, and the pot becomes a bigger one. So that’s it for me, the definition of a prose poem. It is the kind of poem I have always loved, and doing the Yale Anthology of Twentieth-Century French Poetry, for which I chose the translators first and asked each to choose the poets and poems they preferred, to my unsurprise (I now think, though at the time I was bemused), the prose poem won out easily. That is, I know, French prose poetry, and no doubt it does indeed have something to do with escaping the cage of French structure and rules and poetic politeness, maybe. However, when with a friend, I was retranslating my favorite poet, René Char, the same thing happened again: we each chose his prose poems. Whatever this is about, it is about it. So on to American prose poetry.
